Hanging with the U.S. Poet Laureate

by Jeffrey Hillard

This past summer, when our 95-year-old U.S. Poet Laureate greeted me in his front yard on Commercial Street, his stooped torso blended right in with the young flowers he'd planted. Stanley Kunitz finds vitality in his infamous Provincetown garden. At night, when the garden shadows deepen, he finds it in a poem. He never misses a day in his summer garden or a night at his desk.

The tiered garden is so profuse that you slide your way up a narrow footpath to his seaside house. Kunitz winters in New York City and summers in Provincetown, which provides one of the most active writing and artistic communities in the country. Even at 95, and prone to staying more at home, Kunitz is still an Emeritus presence, a man many artists in Provincetown realize is responsible for opportunities allowing artists time and space to work.

In 1968, Kunitz and other local artists (artists Robert Motherwell, Myron Stout, Jack Tworkov, and poet Alan Dugan) established the Fine Arts Work Center, in order to supply talented artists at the outset of their careers with stipends and housing in which to work. In recent years, the Center has enabled writers such as Pulitzer Prize-winners in Fiction, Michael Cunningham and Jhumpa Lahiri, to work on their craft. In fact, in Lahiri's case, she wrote the greater portion of her first book at the Center.

It seems only natural that Provincetown, with Kunitz's lead through the years, would evolve into such a prolific artistic environment, when you consider that artist Charles Hawthorne is credited with founding the first art colony in America in Provincetown in 1899.

Six years later, Stanley Kunitz was born in Gloucester, Massachussetts.

And please call him "Stanley," which I found to be the case my first day at the Center as a Writer-in-Residence, selected by the Ohio Arts Council to work there from June to September. I spent several afternoons with Stanley over the course of the summer. A gracious host and still fiercely dedicated to crafting The Word, Stanley and his wife, poet and artist Elise Asher, recollected moments in a Kunitz career which spans over 15 books, including the new The Collected Poems, and a commitment to improving the lives of working writers like myself.

A few days before this interview, Stanley was guest of honor in a rededication ceremony for the Work Center's Stanley Kunitz Common Room, built in 1989. The auditorium is the centerpiece, showcasing readings, artists' slide shows, film screenings, and lectures. That night of August 24th featured readings by Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Grace Paley, Gerald Stern, Gail Mazur, Cleopatra Mathis, and Gregory Orr.

Stanley is emphatic when elaborating on his approach to writing poetry and what the craft means to him. Ninety years of witness, writing, and interaction have carved insights no other contemporary American poet holds.

WOL: You must have known you had a natural inkling to write even as a child, right?

SK: That's right. It was early in grade school. I always tinkered with word combinations and loved the writing assignments. I couldn't keep from reading, either. I wasn't sure what that meant, of course, but I never veered away from things having to do with language, with words.

WOL: What's one of your earliest childhood memories when that love may have surfaced?

SK: I can tell you precisely. I was recognized by a few teachers as having a verbal gift. It was fourth grade for me. Mrs. McGuillicoty. She gave us an assignment "to write a composition on the father of our country, George Washington" -- her words. So I wrote away. It must have been good because she wanted to read it to the class. A funny thing I wrote in the essay was describing Washington as "a tall, petite, handsome man." That got a chuckle.

WOL: Already your verbal desires were churning. You couldn't help yourself, in a sense. That's important.

SK: Yes, yes, so true. I also, strange as it sounds, studied the dictionary. Found it fascinating. Why? As I got a little older in school, words did something for me I couldn't describe then. I committed myself to adding new vocabulary words to my memory each week. I'd go to our stretch of woods behind the house, roaming around, looking for Indian arrowheads, old Indian trails. But I'd go to a deep spot in the woods and yell out a wild new vocabulary word -- one that hung on the tongue. My favorite was "phantasmagoria." I would let that word loose in the deep woods. It sounded wonderful, too. Also, in 8th grade, as class valedictorian, I chose to read a poem that represented a farewell to elementary school.

WOL: You established marvelous friendships with Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Mark Rothko, and others. How do you characterize the way you influenced each other?

SK: It was an exchange of energy. That's what we truly taught each other. It was an exchange of excitement in the midst of creation. In those days there was no communication between a young poet and a successful poet -- say like we're having now -- largely because there weren't programs or a sense of established community, say like the Fine Arts Work Center or The Vermont Studio. But what we gave to each other then was the understanding that dedication to the art was most essential. I hate for them not to be here now, but unfortunately they met with life circumstances that took them different directions. Roethke was my first, real dear friend in the arts.

WOL: Many know you helped establish the Fine Arts Work Center. But there's Poet's House -- a phenomenal resource for poets -- in Manhattan, too. How is it doing?

SK: It's doing beautifully. I co-founded Poet's House with Elizabeth Kray when she asked for my assistance. Incredibly, New York didn't have a real poetry library, so that's what we created in 1985. We endeavored to develop a center of poetry activity. We've added to Poet's House ever since.

WOL: At 95, you don't seem ready to back down from much, although you must pick projects very carefully. What about your work, though? That comes first for you. How will the Poet Laureate role factor into your schedule?

SK: I will do very little traveling. That was a condition of my acceptance. I'll delegate some important work from my residencies. I'll keep my same writing schedule, which is from late evening to an early morning hour. That's my system. I write at night, when the world sleeps. I get my sleep in daylight hours. I'm a night owl.

WOL: But you have some major plans for your tenure as Laureate.

SK: I want to energize and expand poetry activity in the libraries in our country, especially rural and inner city libraries. I want to affect a program whereby libraries promote poetry in ways they haven't yet. Workshop offerings, interactivity, readings, text improvements. This is one project. Next, I want the oral promise and quality of poetry to become more evident. I want my position to sponsor poetry gatherings that encompass a variety of oralizing. A focus on the oral tradition. It doesn't matter to me what the poem is. It matters that it's being spoken, read, or recited. Using different media in the presentation is fine, too. In public, for others to experience.

WOL: Talk about your approach to writing, a little about your interesting methodology.

SK: I try to discover the rhythm of the words first. I belong to the oral tradition. It means everything for me to hear it. I will take a line, an opening line or two, and re-do the lines so that they project a true rhythm. I want a song lying under the surface of my words. I get it so incantation wants to take over the unfurling of the poem. Sometimes I say lines over a hundred times, move the rhythm into a new phase until I get it right.

WOL: You're trusting your ear, then?

SK: That's what it is for me -- trusting my ear, certainly a great deal of the way. Trusting the music.

WOL: How do you write?

SK: By hand. Write it all down and then much later I'll transfer the poem to a typewriter. I use a long yellow sheet of paper. The length is important. When I start to type, I type the lines I have until I come to a block. Then I go back and begin again; here I try to find a repetition. I change lines so much in doing so that often I'll have 50 sheets of paper of a single poem on the floor. I work a long time on one poem. I always have. It comes back to its pacing and how it occurs down the page, how it moves. I never worry about sending out a poem to a magazine until it's all worked out through many, many refinements. The focus should only be on the art for quite a while.

-- JH
©2001 Jeffrey Hillard

A Contributing Editor for Writer Online, Jeffrey Hillard is the author of three books of poems, most recently Pieces of Fernald: Poems and Images of a Place. He is also a journalist, fiction writer, and screenwriter who teaches at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. Jeff was appointed by the Ohio Arts Council as a Summer 2000 writer-in-residence at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Jeff begins moderating an ongoing poetry workshop in February for WriteRead University.